and the wrong shall fail and the right prevail

Three Poems by Frank O'Hara

My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another,
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulger. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!," all to the good! I
don't wear brown adn grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart --
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

Joseph Cornell

Into a sweeping meticulously-
detailed disaster the violet
light pours. It's not a sky,
it's a room. And in the open
field a glass of absinthe is
fluttering its song of India.
Prarie winds circle mosques.

You are always a little too
young to understand. He is
bored with his sense of the
past, the artist. Out of the
prescient rock in his heart
he has spread a land without
flowers of near distances.

Stag Club

A prickly beer's like
snow on your asshole --
all the asphodels farting
through a poem by Robert Burns.
Joys of interminable beers!
teeth green as grass, the kiss
under the table upside down
mushrooming and sweet sun
over the bitches, their pears.